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Click here to order Naturally Curious Day by Day. Click on image to order from the publisher. Search Naturally Curious Blog Posts. Follow Following. Naturally Curious with Mary Holland Join 12, other followers. Sign me up. But we have just published new research in Royal Society Open Science that shows that genes might actually evolve faster when the pressure to adapt is reduced.
Specifically, we looked at what happens to animals that huddle together to keep warm. We found that when animals huddle in larger groups, their genes for regulating temperature evolve faster, even though there is less pressure to adapt to the cold environment because of the warmth of the huddle.
When animals such as rats and mice huddle together in groups, they can maintain a high body temperature without using as much energy as they would on their own. When the effects of huddling were built into the computer model, the reduced pressure to adapt was actually found to accelerate evolution of the genes controlling heat production and heat loss.
Why was this? When two related genes or sets of genes are well adapted to the environment, mutation of one gene may have catastrophic consequences for the species unless the other gene mutates at the same time in a complementary way. If head sizes get bigger then so should pelvic sizes.
If genetic pairs do not change simultaneously then evolution can get stuck, unable to fully explore the space of possible combinations of genes and so unable to discover better adaptations to the environment. Even when cows push their way into the food, the cows that they bump out of the way will lick the neck of the offending cow as a way to ease any social tension. Although cows are usually kept in enclosed farmlands now, they are descended from large, migratory herding animals called aurochs that roamed the plains of Europe and Asia.
Traveling and migrating as a herd is necessary for wild herd animals because if they end up getting separated from the herd they become an easy target for predators. Modern cows have no need for this migratory herd dynamic, but the herd mentality is deeply ingrained in them and you can still see herds of cows sticking together even on a farm. Cows move as a group when they are being called in for milking or feeding, or when they are being rotated on to fresh pastures.
The evolutionary explanation for this behavior is that a large herd is easier to defend against predators. Cows are curious and inquisitive, but they are still prey animals and are quite easily spooked.
This odd combination of characteristics means that cows like to explore and understand their environment, but they do it slowly and in a group. My favorite example of this is cows huddling together in a field to listen to music. There are lots of videos of cows coming to listen to accordions, trombones, tubas, and even just human voices. To sum up, cows huddle together in lots of different circumstances, but the underlying reason is usually socialization or protection.
Some specific examples of when cows huddle together include feeding or grazing, socializing, moving around as a herd, for protection from predators, and to perform a threat assessment on new things in their environment. Cows are hard-wired to work together.
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